Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous Update #47

The latest Kickstarter update for Owlcat Games’ Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous lets us know that the backer portal will be going live later than anticipated and then spends quite a while talking about Owlcat’s approach to creating cutscenes. If you’re interested in that particular area of game design, you should check it out. Here are the text bits:

Dear Pathfinders,

We wanted to open the backer portal for you asap so much and rushed to give you the launch date, that we didn’t take into account some of the issues that still need our attention. Yet again, we need to apologize, as we have to postpone the portal launch for a few more days. We are sorry to disappoint your expectations like that. To brighten up the wait, we’ve prepared an interesting and informative dev. diary update for you today, hope you will like it!

In the games we make in our studio, the plot is of paramount importance. And in modern games, the plot is commonly conveyed using cutscenes. There were over two thousand of them in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. There will be even more cutscenes in Wrath of the Righteous, offering even more opportunities.

Generally speaking, a cutscene is like an in-game movie clip. Control is taken away from the player, and a pre-designed scene is shown on the screen. We use cutscenes to highlight moments that are important for the story or to introduce new monsters and bosses. But there is also another type of cutscene, which is used to make the game world more real: non-player characters have animated conversations, walk here and there, react to the player running past them, and so on.

Groups of enemies attacking at pre-defined time intervals; crusaders breaking through a gate using a battering ram; giant rolling stone balls you need to dodge—what do all these have in common? In our case, all of the above are created using cutscenes. Cutscenes are a truly multifunctional tool for us and they help us solve very different challenges—from advancing the plot to creating unique gameplay.

How are cutscenes organized on the backend? In a simple case, a cutscene is a sequence of commands executed one by one. For example, an NPC runs to a certain spot, unsheathes a weapon, says a phrase, and then starts a fight.

But a cutscene usually has more than one participant, and one command sequence will clearly not suffice. We can have as many sequences as needed, and they can work in parallel and start new ones when they end; they can be looped or launched selectively, triggered by different conditions.

We can use all types of commands and make a unit do whatever we want: run, turn around, dance, flap their hands in panic—in other words, play different animations. Or we can use abilities and spells to make a unit appear out of nowhere while the player isn’t looking, die, vanish into thin air, and so on. Each command normally lasts for a certain time, then the next one begins; or we can simply set a time delay—one of the most common commands.

What other ingredients go into a cutscene recipe? Often we need to move the game camera and clear away the fog of war to show cutscene participants. Before that, we can turn on dramatic music and add some visual effects like a magic explosion or blood spatter. And we don’t leave the game mechanics behind—dealing damage at the right moment, buffing, moving characters to another area, and many other things.

Finally, one of the most important commands is control blocking. When this is on, the player can’t control the characters or camera, or use the interface at all. Cutscenes like this immediately grab your attention; they are in fact videos, and are used most often to progress the plot. Other cutscenes can be thought of as background ones and appear during gameplay.

Background cutscenes allow us to make the surrounding world more immersive, so that NPCs don’t just stand there like dummies, that demons fly in the sky, and that when a massive door to an ancient tomb opens, a rasping sound is played, the dust of ages settles, and the camera shakes a little, emphasizing the importance of the moment.

Cutscenes can be quite complex! Imagine you command your character to hang an artifact banner over the gates of Drezen. Control is taken away from you, the character runs to the edge of the wall, and a special animation is played. The banner appears, it unfolds with the corresponding animation and a special effect that shows the banner’s magical impact on the environment. Then the camera smoothly moves to the square in front of the gates, the fog of war clears away, and you see a group of friendly crusaders fighting demons. The crusaders are inspired, the demons are weakened by the banner and try to use teleportation to flee. But teleportation does not work, so they try to flee on foot, and they die. The crusaders triumph. All this is one giant cutscene. Each crusader and each demon follows a designated sequence of commands: they hit, use abilities, die, or try to flee at the right time at the assigned locations. It’s like a puppet show, where all the string-pulling is scripted in advance.

In the editor, this scene will look like a lot of parallel command sequences, which are started and stopped by different conditions and events. Depending on their complexity, cutscenes can take from a few minutes to several weeks to create.

In most cutscenes, characters carry out the same sequences of actions as during gameplay—they run, fight, and use spells and abilities. All this is assembled in the editor by one person, usually a level designer. But sometimes we need to show special animations that have never been used before: pensively scratching one’s head, hitting something with a battering ram, or running to a balcony and leaping off. Inanimate objects might need to be animated, like stones rolling down a hill, a gate breaking open, or a column collapsing. In these cases, cutscenes will require extra work by artists, animators, and FX artists.

That’s why we normally use existing assets in cutscenes, but sometimes we order new unique animations and effects. Needless to say, we use the coolest cutscenes to emphasize the most important, emotionally significant moments in the game. In Wrath of the Righteous, for example, we’d like to celebrate the player’s character reaching each subsequent stage of the mythic progression by adding dramatic camera spinning, zooms, and distinctive animations and effects.

As with many other things in game development, cutscene creation presents an important and interesting, but time- and labor-intensive task. It is one of the threads in a huge, complex tapestry. This is how a long, tedious, creative yet routine development process gradually turns into magic. The magic of game creation—exciting and diverse, with challenging mechanics and lots of opportunities, evoking powerful and memorable emotions and a desire to share experiences. Just what we love.